Saturday, February 28, 2004

Fascist Bohemia

Fascist Bohemia

The Vittoriale is a beautiful spot on the shore of Lago di Garda, complete with a battleship that sticks out of the mountainside. Dimension color, composition.
Reduce art sterile color Piet Mondrian Kasimir Malevich
near-monochrome White is abandoned.
Balla’s boots kicking Matteotti to death.
Jackson Pollock's erratic paint The art world has reached a dead end.

The urinal as sculpture encapsulates an age informed by Jennifer Lopez.
creative process. is a statement of nothingness. The artist not the great creator –
We went shopping at Home Depot For tools and nuts Poet as priest without the pedophilia mass-produced factory hog farms Flags are flying and vulgarity is codified the gas seeps in

Stinky Cheese

Lust and love are not enemies waging battle against each another. They indeed cry for union. When you surrender, the battle ends. Sexuality is a doorway into bliss. If you release your view of conditioned sex, you will enter into a dimension of pure ecstasy. As you continue the dance of uninhibited sexuality, you will enter into a state of consciousness that goes beyond mind. It is here that you can touch the face of God I call this unconditional love. As you fully embrace your pure animal nature, a magical embracing of heaven and earth comes into existence for you. As you celebrate the gift of physical joy, you do not actually quite subdued there are still many others that don't let the viewer off so easy. It's primarily the execution and presentation that makes it like butter on popcorn.

Born Again Christians

by picturesque villains nor does he die in ecstasies of religious faith. His religion is but another snare of the oppressors, and the bitterest of his misfortunes; the hounds that hunt him are disease and accident, and the villain who murders him is merely the prevailing rate of wages. And who can thrill the reader with the tale of a man-hunt, in which the hunted is a lousy and ignorant foreigner, and the hunters are the germs of consumption, diphtheria, and typhoid? Who can make a romance out of the story of a man whose one life adventure is the scratching of a finger by an infected butcher-knife, with a pine box and a pauper's grave as the dénouement? And yet it may be just as painful to die of blood-poisoning as to be beaten to death; to be tracked by bloodhounds and torn to pieces is most certainly a merciful fate compared to that which falls to thousands every year in Packingtown -- to be hunted for life by bitter poverty, to be ill clothed and badly housed, to be weakened by starvation, cold and exposure, to be laid low by sickness or accident -- and then to lie and watch while the gaunt wolf of hunger creeps in upon you and gnaws out the heart of you, and tears up the bodies and souls of your wife and babies." The Appeal to Reason (Socialist), of Girard, Kan., in commenting along the same line upon the scant attention paid to the laborer in Packingtown, observes: "It seems that the public becomes enraged only when deliberate murder is planned and actually done upon itself. It seems to me that not less important and alarming are

Dixie Chicks

that his father is dead, Fando embarks on a journey to try and find out the truth behind the lies he has been told. The story is presented in real time clips as well as inventive flashbacks. Throughout the story, there are also multi colored dream/fantasy sequences (using video footage and gels) which allow the viewer to delve into the psyche of these most unique characters even further. Outrageous, gritty, shocking, over the top and brilliant… these are all words that can be used to describe Viva La Muerte and still will not do the film any amount of justice whatsoever. The story comes complete with characters that just scream pain and agony, misunderstood and searching for some kind of truth or meaning. Children are really the centerpiece of the film, children that are trapped in a world of corruption, revolt and corporal punishment in schools. You will feel emotionally drained and exhausted after watching this film, it's not an easy experience… not easy, but wholly fulfilling. While some scenes of onscreen violence are was not to expose "the condemned-meat industry," but rather to "make the average American sympathize with the story of the foreign-born wage-slave in Packingtown." "I do not wish to be ungracious," he adds, "but I fear that 'The jungle' would have been much longer in doing its work had its appeal been simply to the hearts and consciences of its readers and not at all to their stomachs." He goes on: "And yet we are tied up in the same country with these strangers, and their fate is our fate; the way our country goes in the future depends upon what opportunities and what life we give them. They are coming here at the rate of a million a year, and if we think that we can allow them to be beaten and degraded without limit, and not pay a fearful penalty for it ourselves, we make a great mistake. "The whole country is at this moment struggling against the power of the trusts. You yourself are suffering from their encroachments and are fighting to free yourself. And it is the power of the political machine which holds you down; and the power of the machine is founded upon the foreign vote, which is bought.... "About twelve years
ago old P. D. Armour, at the close of a great strike, had declared with an oath that he would fix the population of Packingtown so that it would never call a strike upon him again; and so he had set his agents at work to bring out hordes of emigrants from Eastern Europe -- Lithuanians, Poles, Bohemians, and Slovaks. I met dozens of men who had come as a direct result of his endeavor. Strangers had come to their village -- men who spoke their own language and were familiar with their ideas, and who told wonderful tales about free America and about the great packing-factories and the tremendous wages that were paid there. One could get over for almost nothing, for arrangements had been made with the steamship company, and so they had sold out all that they owned and come, sometimes whole families of them, sometimes half a dozen families from a single village. They had poured into Packingtown, one swarm after another; and as a result old P. D. Armour had had all the labor he could use and had beaten down wages to the starvation point and made himself one of the richest men in America and his son one of the half-dozen masters of the destiny of the American people." These ignorant strangers, he adds, "had been plundered from the moment they left their native village." On every hand they are cheated and preyed upon by grafters, real-estate sharks, and what not. Mr. Sinclair condenses a section of "The Jungle," showing how houses are sold to immigrants on the instalment plan and then taken from them, after hundreds of dollars have been paid in, for inability to pay an instalment at a certain time. He continues: "The typical tenement-house in Packingtown is a two-story frame building having four small rooms on a floor. A floor will be rented by a family, which will then take in boarders to help make expenses. Single men, of whom there are large numbers, occasionally rent a flat for themselves. Most of the Poles and Slavs with whom I talked said that they were saving up money to get away from America because the work was too hard for them to stand. They live sometimes as many as thirteen in a room, renting a room and employing a woman to cook for them cooperatively. They have mattresses spread on the floor, covered with blankets which are never changed until they wear out; and frequently the same mattress is owned by a day man and a night man and thus never gets a chance to get cold. The filth and vermin in these rooms are, of course, beyond any words; and, needless to say, in the winter time no fresh air ever gets into the building. Living in homes such as this, and working ten or twelve hours a day under terrific pressure -- and liable to work fourteen in rush season -- the men have very little vitality left, and know no way to spend their money except in drink.... "When I had finished 'The Jungle' I went through it and cut out everything that sounded like preaching. Here is one of the paragraphs which I cut out -- the best statement I can make upon this question: "'Once upon a time a great-hearted woman set forth the sufferings of the black chattel-slave and roused a continent to arms. She had many things in her favor which can not be counted on by him who would paint s brutally confiscated , in the ways I have described, by Justinian and Theodora. But how they were able to rob even the Senate of all its property I shall now reveal. There was in Constantinople a man by the name of Zeno, grandson of that Anthamius who had formerly been Emperor of the West. This man they appointed, with malice aforethought, Governor of Egypt, and commanded his immediate departure. But he delayed his voyage long enough to load his ship with his most valuable effects; for he had a countless amount of silver and gold plate inlaid with pearls, emeralds and other such precious stones. Whereupon they bribed some of his most trusted servants to remove these valuables from the ship as fast as they could carry them, set fire to the interior of the vessel, and inform Zeno that his ship had burst into flames of spontaneous combustion, with the loss of all his property. Later, when Zeno died suddenly, they took possession of his estate How Justinian killed a trillion people That Justinian was not a man, but a demon, as I have said, in human form, one might prove by considering the enormity of the evils he brought upon mankind. For in the monstrousness of his actions the power of accurate reckoning dialectical antagonism back to elements of postmodern art At least since medieval times, there has been a motivating sense of antagonism between ‘then’ and ‘now’, between ancient and modern. A rejection of one’s predecessors seems almost instinctively generational. The result of this historical dialectic is that Western culture recognises no single tradition. History is carved up into conceptual periods and tradition is constituted and indeed energised by what is combat with it. modernism Another peculiarity of Western culture is its strongly historicist bias, a belief that history determines the way things must be. "Mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve…we will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation." Karl Marx, preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy of all those whom he destroyed would be impossible, I think, for anyone but God to make. Sooner could one number, I fancy, the sands of the sea than the men this Emperor murdered. Examining the countries that he made desolate of inhabitants, I would say he slew a trillion people. For Libya, vast as it is, he so devastated that you would have to go a long way to find a single man, and he would be remarkable.